Piping curl into a pager

E.g.
$ curl www.google.com | sed '/<[^>]*>/d' | less

Could this be used as the basis for a text-based browser? Curl has POST and cookies support too, and Guile Scheme could be used instead of javascript.

Could this be used as the basis for a text-based browser?

I'm gonna save you the trouble, and tell you this isn't a good idea. Lots of people had the same idea before you, and it never amounted to anything.
Just fork elinks and do what you want with that.